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 Belas Knap long barrow, Gloucestershire

Prehistoric Britain – Dr Christopher and Jacquetta Hawkes

The mausoleum most fashionable among the Windmill HiIl people was the long barrow, an earthen mound or stone cairn built on a monumental scale that must have demanded great and well-organized labour. The stones piled into a long cairn would-be at least enough to build the average country parish church.

Many long barrows are from 200 to 300 feet Iong and over 50 feet wide, and if nowadays they rarely stand more than 8 feet in height, this is in part due to the levelling processes of time.

The most familiar type of long barrow is the earthen one which has no visible architectural features. As we know them today ,low, grassy, pear-shaped mounds lying among the lesser fry of Bronze Age round barrows, their construction looks simple enough, but when they were in commission, many had structures, since collapsed, which must have given them a certain architectural quality. Such structures might include a curving facade of stout timbers across the wider end and side walls of turf or posts rising above deep flanking ditches.

In some of them, too, the larger end covered some form of wooden chamber in which many bodies might be found together.

The great majority of these earthen long barrows are to be seen along the southern chalk from Sussex to Dorset, but there are other interesting groups on the Yorkshire and Lincolnshire Wolds. A freakish example discovered below the Iron Age camp at Maiden Castle in Dorset deserves special mention, for it not only reached the fantastic length of nearly one-third of a mile, but contained a dismembered corpse that had evidently been jointed and had its skull split open to play the central role at a ritual feast-probably with the intent that the participants should absorb with his flesh something of the dead man’s qualities and might.

But such customs cannot have been very usual among our ancestors; burial in the barrows was commonly by simple inhumation, the body being crouched, ….possibly to recall the fetal attitude in preparation for a rebirth……..

Sometimes, however, cremation was practised, most conspicuously in Yorkshire, where the long barrows were at times raised over specially designed trenches in which the corpses had been burnt on pyres of wood.

 Belas Knap long barrow, Gloucestershire